"Wireless" is usually good, but is it sometimes it is too much of a good thing?

It's easy to say that when you connect without wires, that's good, but sometimes it is not the case.

No doubt about it, when you can connect unit A to unit B without wires, you usually have a more attractive and user-convenient product than when you need A to be physically tethered to B. You get freedom to move around the room, office, house, or even outside; you get flexibility; and you get one less thing to be tangled up in the so-called "rat's nest" of cables. [Note: by "wireless" I mean RF, but it can also be an infrared (IR) connection, of course.]

But wireless has its costs, especially for short-distance connections of up to, say, a few meters. First, the bill-of-materials (BOM) cost tends to be higher than for a wired link (although this is often offset by the cost of a physical cable and its connectors). Second, the set-up protocol is usually more complicated and prone to "problems", although this, too has improved greatly in recent years, with the establishment and penetration of mass-market standards such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and others. Third, there are issues of throughput, latency, and susceptibility to EMI/RFI that affect link performance, reliability, and consistency. And finally, there is the debug aspect: it is much easier to definitively establish or break a wired link for test purposes, since it is largely about the cable and its visible connection.

This doesn't mean that a wired link is always better than a wireless one. As with so many engineering and product decisions, the best or right solution depends on many factors, such as cost, operating environment, and user situation, among many others. And the underlying data which helps drive the best-choice decision is not static since prices, technical capabilities, and even user preferences keep changing.

But there is no doubt that "wireless" is hot, and it's so hot that my ears are tuned to listening for it used in the context of almost any product. The other day, for example, I was "vegging out" by the TV, not really watching, when I heard the voice-over of a commercial for the latest, greatest in ladies' undergarments from Victoria's Secret. The announcer was touting that it was "wireless". Now, that one certainly caught me by surprise!♦